Textual Chef

Textual Chef · a cooking reference

Recipes, plainly told.

A food photo is styled to sell you the dish, not to cook it with you. Most recipe apps bury the method under the features. Textual Chef is only the text: what you need, what you do, and nothing else.

Open the app The first 30 days are free.

Fig. 1 — a complete entry, reproduced at working size. The controls are live; try the batch dial.

Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies

Soft and chewy, crisp at the edges. The dough rests for no one; total time is honest.

27 min Easy Makes 24 Standard

AmericanVegetarianOvenBaking

Ingredients

  • 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 cup brown sugar, packed
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 large eggs, room temperature
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Instructions

  1. 1

    Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C). Line baking sheets with parchment paper.

  2. 2

    In a large bowl, cream together 1 cup butter, 1 cup brown sugar, and 1/2 cup granulated sugar until light and fluffy, about 2-3 minutes.

  3. 3

    Beat in 2 eggs one at a time, then stir in 2 tsp vanilla extract.

  4. 4

    In a separate bowl, combine 2 1/2 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp baking powder, and 1 tsp salt. Gradually add to the wet ingredients and mix until just combined.

  5. 5

    Fold in 2 cups chocolate chips and 1 cup walnuts if using. Do not overmix.

  6. 6

    Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing them 2 inches apart.

  7. 7

    Bake for 9-11 minutes or until edges are golden but centers are still soft.

  8. 8

    Let cookies cool on the baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring them to wire racks to cool completely.

That is the entire page for this recipe. There is no part two.

2 · Notation

How an entry reads

Six conventions, learned in one glance.

1 cup
Quantities are printed inside the step that uses them, in bold. The ingredient list is for shopping; the steps are for cooking. You never scroll between the two.
Half · Standard · Double
One control rescales the whole entry — every amount, in the list and in the steps. Arithmetic at the stove is how salt gets doubled.
Simple mode
Each step reduced to a single clause, for the third time you make a thing.
Pantry lookup
Photograph the shelf. The index returns the entries you can cook tonight, from what is already there.
The list
A week of entries becomes one shopping list, ordered by aisle, duplicates merged.
No installation
Textual Chef is a website. It adds to a home screen and behaves like an app, without the 500 MB download or the update nags.

3 · Contents

What the reference contains

Recipes2,000+
Cuisines90
Words before the first ingredient0
Advertisements0
Autoplaying video0
Pop-ups0
Life stories0

This page practices what it sells: no ad scripts, no web fonts, no icon fonts, no video player. One stylesheet, one script, one image.

The index is public. Browse it whole at the recipe index, or start where most people do: chicken, beef, shrimp, dinners under 30 minutes, vegan dinners, gluten-free desserts, Mexican, Italian, breakfast.

Appendix A · Pricing

What it costs

Two terms, one product. Nothing is gated; the short term simply costs more per month.

TermPrice
Weekly $3.99 / week
Annual ← the sensible one $63.99 / year
  1. Every term opens with 30 days free.
  2. Seven days before the trial converts, we email you. You decide with the notice in hand.
  3. For 30 days after paying, an email to support@textualchef.com is a full refund. No form, no fight.
  4. There is no ad-supported tier. Removing advertisements is not a feature here; it is the premise.
Start the 30 days

Appendix B · Gifts

The reference, given

A year or three of Textual Chef, sent to someone as a redemption code. Nothing renews on them; a gift should not become a bill.

Gifts are always the full annual plan: every recipe, every feature, no renewal surprises for the recipient.

Payment is handled by Stripe. The recipient gets an email with their code.

Colophon

Who made this, and why

Textual Chef is made by a small independent team that got tired of cooking from pages designed for advertisers instead of cooks. There is no ad department to please here. You are the customer, not the product — which is why the guarantee can afford to be blunt: thirty days free, thirty more of money-back, and an email before your trial ever charges. If the reference does not make your cooking simpler, we have not earned the five dollars.

— Press Start Studios, makers of Textual Chef

Errata — none known. Suspected errors in any recipe: support@textualchef.com. Corrections ship to every copy at once; that is the advantage of a reference that is not printed.

The recipe is the point.

Open the app The first 30 days are free.